How to Create a Malevolent Artificial Intelligence

The possibility that a malevolent artificial intelligence might pose a serious threat to humankind has become a hotly debated issue. Various high profile individuals from the physicist Stephen Hawking to the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk have warned of the danger. Which is why the field of artificial intelligence safety is emerging as an important discipline. Computer scientists have begun to analyze the unintended consequences of poorly designed AI systems, of AI systems created with faulty ethical frameworks or ones that do not share human values. But there’s an important omission in this field, say independent researchers Federico Pistono and Roman Yampolskiy from the University of Louisville in Kentucky. “Nothing, to our knowledge, has been published on how to design a malevolent machine,” they say. That’s a significant problem because computer…